Dinis who with infinite diligence searched for documents far and wide, had recourse to the writings of King Alfonso X and others, and spared no pains to give the work an historical as well as a genealogical character. His researches (_Ouue de catar, he says, por gram trabalho por muitas terras escripturas que fallauam das linhagens_) set an excellent example to Fernam Lopez. Certainly the _Livro de Linhagens_ is a vast catalogue of names, with at most a brief note after the name, as ‘he was a good priest’ or ‘a very good poet’; but it also gives succinct stories of the Kings of the Earth from Adam, including Priam, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and the early kings of Portugal, and it contains rare but charming intervals, green oases of legend and anecdote, such as the tale of King Lear with its happy ending, or the account of King Ramiro going to see his wife, who was a captive of the Moors.[114] Count Pedro, by his humanity and his generous conception of what a genealogy should be, really made the book his own. It was naturally consulted by the early chroniclers, its worth was recognized by the ablest author of the _Monarchia Lusitana_,[115] and recently, in the skilful hands of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, it has rendered invaluable service in reconstructing the lives of the thirteenth-century poets.[116] The _Livro de Linhagens_ refers not only to King Lear but to Merlin, King Arthur, Lancelot, and the Isle of Avalon. Many other allusions, both earlier and later, to the Breton cycle, the _matière de Bretagne_, are to be found in early Portuguese literature: to the lovers Tristan and Iseult, to the _cantares de Cornoalha_,[117] to the chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table. In the fourteenth century many in Portugal were baptized with the name of Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival; and Nun’ Alvarez (1360-1431) chose Galahad for his model, and came as near realizing his ideal as may be given to mortal man. In Gil Vicente’s time the name Percival had already descended to the sphere of the peasants: as Passival (i. II) in 1502 (_Auto Pastoril Castelhano_) and Pessival (i. 117) in 1534 (_Auto de Mofina Mendes_).